It took 16 years, but the Gilmore Girls writers have at last braved a big truth that needed telling: Rory Gilmore is a terrible, terrible human.

Finally, the reluctant poster child of white privilege — the girl who had everything handed to her on a shiny golden platter — was dealt a dilemma consuming enough to bring her universe crashing down.

The real world.

Rory’s belated quarter-life crisis is strangely satisfying to watch. She was never equipped for life after college. Throughout the series, her doting family and medicated townsfolk hailed her as an infallible angel, praising her smallest achievements.

She coasted through young adult life, her expensive education, car and rent all paid for, never once flipping burgers or folding clothes like the rest of us did.

But despite a frustrating lack of maturity, Rory was always presented in a positive light, assumed by all to achieve great things.

At the end of the final season (which, in all fairness, wasn’t Amy Sherman-Palladino’s work) Rory abruptly meets her idol Christiane Amanpour, and magically scores a dream gig covering Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

When the revival aired, I was afraid Rory’s story would likewise be unrealistically generous: a high-flying reporter who’s soared through the ranks and now hosts Lorelai Leigh Gilmore 360° on CNN.

She’d tell Jimmy Kimmel about her success, faux-humbly bemoaning her tough upbringing in a working-class single-parent country household, while the rest of us throw up our tater tots and Pop Tarts accordingly.

So working-class.Source:Supplied

But keeping with its running theme of class warfare and privilege, the revival uses the youngest Gilmore to make an important point: money and status don’t necessarily buy success, no matter how much you deny having it.

A decade on, Rory is complaining about her unemployment, lack of direction and difficulty securing financial independence.

Sure, America’s job market is brutal. The media industry is ridiculously competitive. Thousands of Ivy League graduates are applying for the same position.

But Rory’s problem is simple: she was raised to believe she was the cream of the crop, and is too spoilt to see beyond her own self-indulgent world view.

A telling moment in the revival is her excrutiating interview with Sandee Says, a fictitious startup website that scopes her out.

When the CEO innundates her with calls, begging her to take a job that most people in her position would have killed for, she turns it down.

She turns down a job, all the while whinging about her lack of employment opportunities.

A few failings later, Rory finally caves and decides she’d best slum it with the peasants.

She walks into a newsroom she believed to be beneath her with no preparation, no references, not one single good idea to bring to the table... and then has the audacity to be outraged when they decide she’s not fit for the role.

“Rory, can you give us one example of a story you’d write for us?”Source:Supplied

“Just ONE example, Rory.”Source:Supplied

“RORY, WHY ARE YOU SUCH A TERRIBLE PERSON?”Source:Supplied

It’s implied Rory’s had very little experience in the industry over the past decade (in case falling asleep during a GQ reporting job and then sleeping with a subject wasn’t an indicator).

She’s dabbled in a bit of freelance work, with one New Yorker article plastered on the back of Luke’s menu and gloated about in a most annoying manner.

And yet she seems to think she deserves to go from unemployed to editor-in-chief in a day. Why work your way up when you’re Richard and Emily Gilmore’s granddaughter?

Of course, she ends up giving up and penning a book exploiting her previous generations’ years of sacrifice instead, the fate of which is left to the viewer’s imagination (a nameless millennial penning a memoir about their life — props for originality).

#jernalizmSource:Supplied

Rory’s storyline was largely criticised on social media. Some said she’d “become” incredibly annoying. The writers were criticised for “suddenly” making her character so unlikeable.

But Logan of all people said it best in season seven: “Wake up Rory. Whether you like it or not, you’re one of us. You went to prep school. You go to Yale. Your grandparents are building a whole damn astronomy building in your name.”

This has been Rory all along: the self-entitled hypocrite too wrapped up in her own cosy world to channel her good fortune towards something worthwhile.

Better late than never, the revival forced her to examine her privilege through a cold hard dose of reality.